Triangle
by The Urban Spaceman
Summary: Nobody's perfect. MeMe isn't who everybody thinks she is. Fantomex spends most of his time dreaming up methods of killing his team-mates. Betsy's losing faith in their fearless leader, who himself is a clone with a 24-hour expiration time. Never has there been a more mismatched X-Force team. (Post-issue #7)
1. Chapter 1

Triangle

Data.

She swam in it. Flew through it. Let herself unfold and absorb it. Felt it wash over her, lapping at her non-flesh, her bit-body, the ones and zeros of binary an ever-present hum, comforting old friends.

_Humhumhum_ they said, and she listened. Watched. Eavesdropped. Sifted. Extrapolated. Recorded.

She did everything a good MeMe was supposed to do. Helpful. Obedient. Youthfully cheeky. She was the very epitomé of MeMeness.

Of course, she _wasn't_ MeMe. But nobody had known MeMe. The now-dead girl was a _tabula rasa_ upon which Hope had stamped her own mark. And so successfully had she stamped it that not even her father knew it was her.

Or, her father's clones. All of them. One after the other. Each one the same. None of them exactly like the others. Same-likeness. Same-difference. Same-sameness. Each clone a little more than the sum of his parts. Each part never enough to make a whole. A community of Cable, added to, one day at a time. Bit by bit.

Bit by bit. That was the way data worked, too. Bit by bit by bit by bit. So many bits. The whole world was flooded with them. They travelled through the air like oxygen atoms. They were soaked up by the sea, which was a giant bit-sponge. They were even sent into outer space, where one day they would be encountered by future alien civilisations, who would wonder what these bitty things were and might come looking for their source.

If they didn't wait too long, they might find the Earth. The planet might still be around, by the time the bits reached anything or anyone of consequence.

The age of technology was a wonderful thing. Even on a clear night sky, with no planes overhead, no birds calling from the trees, not even a gentle breeze to stir the grass in a field, everything was full of data. It was everywhere. Stray signals bounced down off clouds or fell out of the troposphere and rained down in the most unlikely of places. Most people never saw the bits, never heard the transmissions, never smelled the data as it clumsily crawled around the planet.

But MeMe wasn't most people, and Hope-as-MeMe was even less of most people. The task Cablefather-Clone had given her was daunting. _Find me something to point a gun at. Find me Volga, and I'll have Doc Nemesis design you a brand new platform._ Yes, daunting, despite the promise of more freedom and power in her MeMe form.

Daunting. So much data. So much noise. _Humhumhum_ translated into _Hi Mom, I'm going to be home late from school._ It was _I'm sorry, but I can't make that deadline, please don't fire me!_ A surprising amount of the time, it was, _The #&$%ing drummer got arrested again, so we gotta cancel. _It was always the drummer.

Seven billion-plus people. Many-billion of them with some sort of data device. So many people, all alone, all talking and being alone together and telling themselves they weren't alone because they had so many people being alone with them that it was a sort of communal loneliness. Their lives were all different, but their stories all familiar. They sang the same tunes, as if adhering to a template.

_I'm going to be late for work. The babysitter just cancelled. I love you. I'm sorry. They say he didn't suffer. The party starts at ten. Bring beer. Bring pretzels. I don't think we should see each other anymore. See you at the gym. The gym instructor's hot. Have you done your homework? My home just got repossessed. Did you watch insert-country-name-here's got talent? Can you believe what she wore? I wore it better. We went skinny dipping last weekend. I have the flu-pox-clap-runs-illness. Should I get a note? Where's the nearest pizza place? What time are you home for dinner? Dinner's at eight. Goodnight. I love you. _

And those were just the air-data. Things became much more entangled where web-data was concerned. _Like_ this. _Like_ that. Hashtag-I'mLikingThis. Trend trend, tweet tweet, like like poke like. So many people... so much data... so little to say. Poke the people you see in school tomorrow. Hashtag the things you agree with to make them trends, then stop Liking them when they become too popular. How was a girl to find anything of use when people drowned themselves in Likes and Pokes and Trends and Tweets and Blogs and Tumbls and _oh it just went on forever_. And when they weren't Liking things and Poking people and Trending hashtags and Tweeting news and Blogging diaries and Tumbling pictures, they were Bidding and Posting and Commenting and Friending and Searching and Browsing and Shopping.

_Shopping._ Like the people who had died in the explosion. Shopping for weapons, hunting for new ways of killing their fellow man, their fellow mutant. Because on a planet inhabited by seven billion people, you couldn't be truly alone until you'd killed everyone who wasn't you.

Loneliness. It was sharp. As biting as the bits in which Hope-as-MeMe floated. Never before had she felt it like this. Granted, spending your whole life on the run, trying to evade men who were trying to kill you simply because you were born, was not a great way to spend a childhood. But Hope had managed. She'd had friends, from time to time. And always, _always_ she'd had her father. Not her real father, of course, but the man who had saved her and raised her and taught her how to shoot a gun... Cable was the only father she'd ever needed. The only father _anybody_ ever needed. And now he was lying in a stasis chamber, dying by two hours every twenty-four.

Hope had, from time to time, felt an occasional twinge of loneliness. Hope-as-MeMe was almost overwhelmed by it. Whilst her body remained comatose, her consciousness had piggy-backed off MeMe, her mutant power allowing her to take the dead girl's place. At first, the datascape had been enough. The information had held her interest, and she'd seen things she could only have dreamed of before now. But mutants who could navigate the datascape were few and far between. This place was not like the Astral Plane, which any mutant with an ounce of psychic ability could walk and almost all dreamers passed through at some point. No, this place was different. A place of numbers and maths and signals, and the mutant gene was still trying to catch up with technology. Hope-as-MeMe had felt the presence of only a few mutants in the datascape, and those she had mostly avoided out of fear of being detected. Out of fear of being outed as a fraud.

Movement in the helicarrier's makeshift surveillance centre brought Hope-as-MeMe's focus away from the datascape, but she did not leave it entirely. Now that she had no body, it was easy to split her thought-process. Uninhibited by flesh, she was released from weaknesses such as the need for food and drink and sleep.

But God, she was lonely.

Fantomex strolled into the room, saw MeMe's holographic platform beside the bank of monitors, halted. Then stepped forward, his posture all tense.

"hey_fanto_," she greeted him, in what she had come to think of as her MeMe-voice. It was how the dead girl had spoken, her cues taken from that monster, Volga, who had created her and forced her to serve him as a digital spy and assassin. Changing the speech patterns too drastically, too quickly, would draw unnecessary attention. Already attention had been drawn. "you_bored_?"

"No, not bored. Just in need of a distraction. My thoughts have been dark of late. I thought I'd help you with the surveillance. That is, if you need my help." Out of character, his French accent was barely discernible. He slipped out of it whenever he wasn't performing. Bad habit. One Hope-as-MeMe decided not to pick up.

"ofcourse helpneeded. SO_MUCH_ data. pullupa chair."

He did not detect her lie. He _couldn't_. His powers of observation only extended as far as reading body-language. With only tone of voice, he was effectively crippled. Hope-as-MeMe needed no help from meatbags. They could only discern what they saw and heard and touched. Restricted. Deaf to data. She would work faster without him.

But the company was welcome. So she gave him some files she'd liberated from the Pentagon and let him think he was being useful. It was what he needed. And he was what _she_ needed. In the end, it was all good.


	2. Chapter 2

It was not a perfect solution.

Killing Cable every day allowed Fantomex to maintain his tenuous grasp on the reality of his own existence, but he could not keep it up forever. Eventually, somebody was bound to notice that he was absent whenever one of their leader's clones expired. It would raise questions. Answers would be expected. Answers which might make the rest of the team... uncomfortable.

Or perhaps not. They _were_ a group of mal-adjusted caffeine-addicted mutant killers, after all.

But even if nobody noticed that Fantomex killed Cable each time the clone finished recording its thoughtlog, this finely balanced status-quo was by no means permanent. Eventually, Doc Nemesis would find a cure, and Cable would be brought out of stasis. No more clones to kill. Or, and this was looking infinitely more likely, no cure would be found and Cable's original body (if that term was even an accurate description of the man) would violently expire. Again. It seemed like Cable was dying every other day, but he always seemed to find a way around death. Some sort of loophole, perhaps.

In any case, Fantomex would, at some point in the not too distant future, find himself up the proverbial creek without a hypothetical paddle. And he had no idea what to do about it.

Oh, he knew what he _would_ do about it. Kill them all, one by one. Doc Nemesis would be first. Fantomex would make it look like Marrow had done it. There was no love lost between the two. It was a plausible outcome.

Marrow herself would be next. It wouldn't be easy, because she had a wicked healing factor that matched, if not _surpassed_ his own (zut alors!) and she was capable of protecting herself from attack by growing her bones freakishly out of her skin and using them as an external carapace. Of course, there were ways around that. First you had to get close. Then you struck for the heart.

Betsy would have to go next. Ironic, considering he'd once died to save her life. But that was before he'd become mentally unhinged. Back in the good old days when your boss didn't explode every day (except that one time when Archangel had become the new Apocalypse, but that didn't really count because Warren had been a time-bomb right from the start). Elizabeth would not be an easy kill, but he had the edge here. He could read her. She could not read him. A small act of misdirection was all he'd need. She would never see him coming.

MeMe would be the hardest to kill, practically speaking. How did one kill something which could exist as data? No heart to aim for. No artery to slice. No throat to crush. Yes, MeMe would be a challenge, but he was fairly certain that if he killed her body, destroyed her holo-platforms and torched the helicarrier, he would end any threat she might pose in the future.

She interrupted his thoughts by appearing beside him, her holographic face suspicious, as if she'd heard his macabre musings. But that wasn't possible. The ceramic plates in his mask protected his mind from telepathic intrusion, and though she could interact with the sentinel nanotech which was fused to the cells of his body, he suspected he'd feel it if she tried, like he'd felt it when she'd pulled him into the datascape the other day.

"lookhereLOOK," she said, calling up a string of data on the monitor in front of him. It was incomprehensible gibberish, but he couldn't rightly admit it; his own self-superiority would not allow it. So he merely nodded, and waited for her to elaborate. "VOLGAtrail. old_days_ but could follow-try. maybe _somewhere_lead?"

"Good idea," he said, for want of something more encouraging.

She stared at him, her holographic eyes empty. Almost dead. But not quite. _Not yet..._

"QUERY why_HERE_ areyou?"

"The same reason any of us are here," he said, affecting a casual shrug. "To protect mutant-kind from any threat which might arise."

"YESno. protect_mutants_GOOD YES. don'tbelieve _you_, but not what ASKINGmeant. why_HERE_ areyou _now_? NOW. HERE."

"Ah." He considered how to respond. Strange as it seemed, he felt at ease around MeMe. She was a girl who'd led a life as a digital slave, created by a man who wanted to use her as a weapon. Her origins echoed his own in many ways, but it was more than that. MeMe, he suspected, was the only one on the team who understood him.

Not completely understood him, of course, because he was, by his very nature, elusive, enigmatic, and inherently un-understandable. But everybody needed to be understood just a little bit. Even men who'd been cobbled together out of sentinel nanobots and mutant DNA by mad Frankenscientists looking to create weapons to hunt down mutants. Even if it meant being understood by nonsense-speaking digital girls who could touch you in strange and mind-blowing ways.

"To tell you the truth, I wanted to do something to try and take my mind off my monumental problems."

"WORKED has it?"

"Not particularly," he admitted. "It's harder than I thought to leave problems behind. I seem to carry them around with me."

"canHELPmaybe." Her holographic generator hummed as she moved to his other side, and a hand appeared, held out towards him. "can _distraction_be. make forget you _all_about problems YES?"

"Therein lies part of the problem," he explained. "If I need to rely on somebody else to help me get over this problem I have, then the problem hasn't truly gone away. By using another person as a crutch I am merely proving to myself that I am too weak to overcome my own issues."

"hmmmBORINGsounds. _howzabout_ someFUNthen? no_need_ for crutchBEING. canjusthave _funfunfun_ bringT-BIRDtooYES?"

He looked at her outstretched hand. _Fun_. How long had it been since he'd had any? Not since Paris, with Betsy. But that was many, many months ago, and he hadn't exactly been... himself... at the time. Only a third of the man he'd once been, in fact. And not even the best _bits_ of a third. Not the bit that could love with all its heart or employ a powerful misdirection.

No, Paris had not been fun. It had been the beginning of the end. The start of all his problems. He'd never experienced such overwhelming jealousy until his three brains had been fused back into one body. The inference was clear; he'd put himself back together wrong.

A bitter pill to swallow.

The door to the room swished open, and Psylocke walked in. MeMe snatched back her hand as if she'd been bitten by a viper, then looked suspiciously guilty, for a holographic projection.

"heyPSYLOCKE whatsup?"

"I wanted to talk to you, MeMe," the purple-haired beauty replied. She shot a meaningful look at Fantomex. "Alone."

He rose from his chair and offered her a bow. _Just one quick movement, a toss of the knife, and she'd bleed out faster than a slaughtered pig._ "Of course, mademoiselle." _He hated her. Hated her and loved her, both at the same time. Yet one more dichotomy in his life._ She stood just within the room, so he slipped past her, and glanced at her unprotected back. _One hand on each side of her head. A quick turn. She'd be dead before she hit the ground._

The door swished closed, and he let out a deep breath. This was his life, now. A constant battle to prevent himself killing the people he very loosely called friends. An unending war between the homicidal mutant-killing sentinel programming that made up the very core of his being, and the values that had been instilled in him by the woman he called _Mother_.

He glanced down at his watch. Twenty hours before the next Cable clone would expire.

It was going to be a long day.


	3. Chapter 3

When Fantomex left, Psylocke felt herself relax. Her encounters with him usually had one of two themes. Either he 'flattered' her by telling her what an excellent killer she was, trying to appeal to the darker side of her personality by forcing her to accept that violence was a part of her, or he engaged in misguided and clumsy attempts to win her back. As if _that_ would ever happen.

She still didn't know why Cable had allowed him to stay with X-Force. He was annoying, arrogant and lived without the benefit of a moral compass to guide his actions. The last time she'd worked with him on X-Force, back when Logan was running the show, he'd been the loosest cannon on the team. Which was kinda hard to believe, given that the team had _Deadpool_ on it. A sure sign of Cable's desperation, that he was willing to employ a man more dangerous and unpredictable than the Merc with a Mouth.

"whyso _sad_face?" asked MeMe.

Only when the girl spoke did Psylocke realise she'd been standing in the middle of the room in pensive reflection of old times. Shaking her head to rid herself of her thoughts, she took the seat Fantomex had vacated and turned to address the hologram.

"You don't have to talk like that to me, Hope."

The holographic faced looked rather flustered. "please, _MeMe_callMe. too many _eaves_toDROP. stayin_character_, less chance of SLIPup."

"Alright, MeMe," she agreed.

"youTALKwant?"

She nodded. "It's Cable. I'm worried about him."

"SHOULDbe. _dad_isCLONEdying." The holographic face frowned. "wishIcouldHELP."

"Doctor Nemesis will find a cure. He's a genius. Just ask him, and he'll tell you how much of a genius he is," she said wryly. "But it's not Cable's physical state that worries me. It's... well, this." She gestured at all the surveillance monitors, and the computers which powered the data search. "I admit, it's not the first time he's spied on the world. Back when he had more of his powers, when he was running Providence, he spied on _everything_. But he had noble goals. He was trying to unite the whole world. Of course, he was completely nuts to even try, but at least he was trampling over people's civil rights for the right reasons. You've heard the saying, _the road to hell is paved with good intentions?_"

"YESheard."

"I fear we're getting one step closer to hell each time a new clone comes out of that tank."

"understand_concerns_," said MeMe. "DATAspying... wrongfeels. butBOSS says DO."

She leant forward, impressing the strength of her gaze on the young mutant's hologram. "You could talk to him. Not as MeMe, but as you. If he knew you were his daughter, and that you didn't want him to do all these questionable things to help you..."

Already, MeMe was shaking her head. "noCAN'T. sendme_AWAY_ hewill. makeme SAFER. _never_seehim again. better thisway. _MeMe_being."

"Sooner or later, he will figure it out for himself. He's a smart man. Sometimes."

"_BRIDGE_crossing tooSOON. don'tTELL, please."

"I won't. But when he eventually _does_ find out, I'm going to pretend I knew nothing about it. It would hurt him too much, if he knew that I knew about you and held that back from him."

The holographic face nodded. "understand. THANKyou." She floated around for a moment, backwards and forwards, as if pacing, then finally came to stop beside Psylocke once more. "_apology_OWE."

"What for?"

The face changed colour, becoming a deeper shade of pink. "EAVESdropped. otherday. heard you and CABLEfather_clone_ talking. didn'tmean to. heardyou_SAD_. offering CABLEfather_clone_ comfort. SORRYsorry."

Psylocke took a deep breath. Told herself that Hope hadn't _meant_ to spy. That she was just a girl, worried for her father and his many clones. It wasn't as if it mattered. Nothing had come of the conversation. "Don't be sorry," she said. "I'm not."

MeMe's face looked surprised by that. "whyNOT?"

"I gave up my ability to feel sorrow. Sacrificed it to save a life. Long story. Don't want to get into it."

"oh. SORRY."

Psylocke smiled. How very unlike Cable his adopted daughter was. "You can feel sorrow for the both of us." Looking for a change of subject, she gestured at the monitors. "How's the search going?"

"haystackNEEDLE. sooooooo _slooooooow_." The platform hovered higher, so that Hope could bring MeMe's face to Psylocke's head height. "heLOVESyou."

Psylocke stiffened, and opened her mouth to say that that was nonsense, that Cable had no such feelings for her, that he was dedicated only to Hope, and the mission. Then she realised they weren't talking about Cable anymore, and felt her eyebrows creep down into a scowl.

"Fantomex is a child," she said. "In infatuated child who wants the biggest, shiniest toy on the shelf. He doesn't know what love is."

"heDIEDfor_you_."

"Have the two of you been talking about me behind my back?" she accused. "Comparing notes?"

"NO_no_ nothingLIKE that. amDATAmutantEXPERT. readfiles, MANYfiles. oldX-FORCEmissions filed away NEATand_tidy_TIDY at school."

Psylocke got a strong impression that Hope was lying, but she didn't want to get into an argument with the girl who'd already lost her father and her body. "There have been sacrifices on both sides," she said. "But Fantomex wants things I can't give him. I can't be... won't be... who he wants me to be, and him becoming what _I_ want him to be would probably kill him."

"QUERY nofeelings have?"

She closed her eyes, and tried to remember the last time she'd had feelings for Fantomex which _hadn't_ been a lie on her behalf, or a misdirection on his. Their whole relationship had been built on sorrow... sorrow she had sacrificed to save his life. Sorrow at what Warren had become, and what Betsy had done to him to save the world. Sorrow which was now only an echo of a feeling, thanks to a brief stint in her brother's home within Otherworld.

Whatever she had felt for Fantomex, had been nothing but physical attraction. In fact, it was not even that. It was knowing that any relationship between them would be Wrong. And would be Complicated. It was the thrill of the chase. Being pursued. Verbal sparring. Words with hidden meanings. Brief but exciting touches here and there. Knowing she had power over him. Knowing that he would never change who he was just to please her, thus giving her reason to eventually hate him.

She opened her eyes.

"No feelings." Then leant forward, lowering her voice. "Hope. Whatever you are doing, are thinking of doing, or could ever possibly conceive of doing, with Fantomex, is bound to earn you nothing but disapproval from your father."

"whatHE doesn'tknow, won't HURThim."

"Maybe not. But knowing Cable as I do... I know he would want more for you."

"more thanALONE_being_?"

"Sometimes it's better to be alone," she said. And yet, Cable's casual rejection still echoed around her mind. None of the clones since then had even mentioned it. Perhaps he hadn't recorded the memory of her offer on the thoughtlog. She could only _hope_ that he hadn't. If it wasn't on the log, then it would never get back to the real Cable, when Doc Nemesis eventually found a cure. And he _would_ find a cure. Of that she was certain.

"MEETINGtime," MeMe said suddenly. "newCLONEnewSPEECHnewIDEAS. _time_forWORKING now."

"You go on ahead," she said. "I'll be along in a moment."

Hope hovered out of the room beneath MeMe's platform, and Psylocke turned to the bank of surveillance monitors. They showed crimes which would go unpunished because they weren't the sort of crimes that would lead to Volga. Wrongs that would never be righted because Cable's mission took precedence. Innocent lives lost or destroyed in the blink of an eye.

_I hope you know what you're doing, Nathan_, she thought. _I truly do_.


End file.
